Local Eagle Scout Represented Over 2 Million Scouts in Washington D.C. as Report to the Nation Delegate

Posted by Kate Jacobs , Community Contributor

Daniel Yu (third from left) and fellow delegates present House Speaker Paul Ryan with the Boy Scouts of America's 2017 Report to the Nation.

Daniel Yu (third from left) and fellow delegates present House Speaker Paul Ryan with the Boy Scouts of America's 2017 Report to the Nation. (Posted by Kate Jacobs , Community Contributor)

Community Contributor Kate Jacobs

Sixteen-year-old Eagle Scout Daniel Yu, from Palatine, Ill., has already taken the Scouting program to the International Space Station, and last week he took it to our nation's leaders. Yu joined 11 Scouts on a trip to our nation's capital to hand-deliver the Boy Scouts of America's Report to the Nation to Congress.

Each year, as part of its congressional charter, the Boy Scouts of America is required to present a report to the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. This report covers who the BSA is as an organization, the programs and initiatives it supports, and its major accomplishments and contributions over the past year.

Yu was selected to represent the BSA's 2 million youth participants and nearly 1 million adult volunteers because of his exceptional work as a member of Troop 209, based out of Palatine, Ill.

Last summer, Troop 209 saw two years of work come to fruition as an experiment they designed and built launched to the International Space Station. Daniel was the software manager for the experiment, which measured the rate of genetic mutations of bacteria in a the Space Station's microgravity environment. The Scouts are now conducting a comparable experiment on Earth and will analyze the results. Their findings could impact research on cancer and tissue growth.

Before presenting the Report to the Nation, Yu and his fellow delegates embarked on an incredible week that included visits to the Pentagon, the Smithsonian's National Museum of National History, and many other notable sites. Of particular interest to Yu was the tour of NASA's Goddard Space Center, where Yu got to speak with scientists and learn how the kind of hands-on STEM experiences young people get in Scouting could translate into exciting jobs at places like NASA. Yu also got to hand-deliver a special Space Station experiment Boy Scout patch to President Trump.

Yu now has his sights set on finishing high school and going to college to study computer science so he can make an even bigger impact on society.